Slips of the Tongue

Before there was Fowler's, there was Fowler.

H. W. Fowler’s “Dictionary of Modern English Usage” is one of the fruits of the Oxford English Dictionary. The O.E.D. was (like many Victorian novels) published in parts: it was a serial publication whose serialization took fifty-four years. In 1879, its editor, James Murray, signed a contract with Oxford University Press, in which he promised to produce a four-volume dictionary within a decade. Five years later, he managed to publish the first part: “A—Ant.” The dictionary was finished in 1933. (Murray expired in 1915, after reaching “Trink—Turndown,” which, if it is not the end of the alphabet, is at least farther than Virginia Woolf’s Mr. Ramsay was able to get.) It fills thirteen volumes: almost sixteen thousand pages.

Murray’s method was to collect, for each word, specimen sentences from printed works illustrating changes in meaning and usage over time. For many years, Murray stored the slips on which these sentences were recorded in his yard in an iron shed known as the Scriptorium. If it had appeared in a Borges story, the Scriptorium would have figured as a kind of alternate literary universe, in which all the sentences ever written in English have been rescrambled, and transformed into a series of free-verse poems on words—all the sentences with “muffin,” for instance, strung together to make a found-object ode to “muffin.”

The dimensions of the actual Scriptorium were not so Borgesian, of course, but it was a fantastic resource. It was as though Murray had drilled a shaft into the history of the language, which one might descend and ascend, observing the linguistic striations. The Delegates of the Oxford University Press soon recognized that although the O.E.D. was a publishing triumph (“the greatest effort probably which any University, it may be any printing press, has taken in hand since the invention of printing,” the Times declared in 1897, after the completion of “Foisty— Frankish”), not many people were likely to rush out and buy a sixteen-thousand-page dictionary. So they planned a series of affordable spinoffs, among them the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (assigned to a man named Little, which shows that the Delegates were not without a sense of humor), the Concise Oxford Dictionary (shorter than the Shorter), and the Pocket Oxford Dictionary (more concise than the Concise). These were all quarried from the big dictionary: they drew on the specimen sentences in the published parts and, in the case of words later in the alphabet, in the warehouse of slips. The press had a dictionary in the works for every market niche. This is where Henry Fowler entered the picture.

Fowler was born in 1858, in Devon. He attended Rugby and Oxford, but his family was not well-off: his father was a schoolteacher, who died at the age of fifty-six, leaving eight children. Henry was the oldest. After Oxford, he became a teacher at a school in Yorkshire called Sedbergh. He seems not to have been a prime object of schoolboy affection: “He took some knowing” was a typical reminiscence. He had a reputation for rectitude, and after seventeen years at Sedbergh he resigned abruptly, because he had come to the conclusion that his lack of religious faith meant that he would never be promoted to housemaster. He was forty-one. He went to London, where he lived on a minuscule inheritance and the income from his writing, mostly essays of a belletristic nature, which he published with some difficulty. Diminished circumstances had no effect on his sense of what was honorable: after The Spectator sent him a check for a piece it had accepted but was unable to run because of lack of space, he refused to write for the magazine again.

He eventually realized that he was too reserved to get far in a literary world that required some talent for social gamesmanship, and in 1903 he moved to the island of Guernsey, a hundred miles off the south coast of England, where his brother Frank had gone into business as a tomato farmer. Fowler lived on Guernsey for twenty-two years. He and Frank became collaborators, first on a translation of Lucian, which Oxford published, and then on “The King’s English” (1906), a guide for writers. This led to their employment in the O.E.D. spinoff industry: they were responsible for both the Concise Oxford Dictionary (1911) and the Pocket Oxford Dictionary (which was published in 1924, after Frank’s death). It was on Guernsey that Fowler wrote the “Dictionary of Modern English Usage.” It came out in 1926, when he was sixty-eight. He died in 1933, the year the O.E.D. was finally finished.

Upright people do not make ideal biographical subjects. To say that Jenny McMorris’s “The Warden of English: A Life of H. W. Fowler” (Oxford; $27.50) is the biography Fowler deserves is neither to take anything away from Jenny McMorris nor to say that it is a particularly compelling biography. Fowler was a person who began every day, no matter what the weather, by rising early, running for a few miles, and then taking a dip in the nearest body of water. This, along with gardening, seems to have marked the upper limit of his conception of “fun.” He lived alone until he was fifty, when he married a local nurse, almost his age, named Jessie Wills, a voluble woman, part of whose appeal was that she relieved her husband, in social situations, of having to talk.

In 1914, when he was fifty-six, Fowler falsified his age in order to enlist in the British Army. (Frank enlisted as well; he was forty-four.) He went to France, but although he had joined a battalion reserved for older men, when his real age was discovered he was taken off the front lines, and eventually, to his shame and disgust, he broke down physically and had to be sent home. In all his work for Oxford University Press, he insisted on a flat fee, and protested mildly when the press mailed him Christmas “bonuses” in lieu of royalties, which he had declined to accept. (One feels that the press, for its part, did not exactly insist. All of that generation of lexicographers, in their low-tech world, were overworked people. Murray wasn’t the only one to die in harness: so did poor Mr. Little, and so did Frank Fowler. It would be interesting to know how much money Oxford has made on the dictionaries they produced; but McMorris doesn’t tell us.) In short, Fowler was a modest, disciplined, and punctilious English gentleman. “He knew what he wanted from life,” wrote the man who produced the second edition of “Modern English Usage,” Ernest Gowers. “What he wanted was within reach; he took it and was content.”

The most striking fact about Fowler’s life is his isolation. There he sat, for more than twenty years, in a cottage on a remote island in the English Channel, writing a book that tells readers what the currently accepted pronunciation of “anchovy” is, when to use “gent” (“only in uneducated speech or in jocular imitations of it”), and the special connotation of “pawky” (“The Englishman is tempted to use the word merely as a synonym in certain contexts for Scotch; any jest uttered by a Scot is pawky, & pawky humour is understood to be unattainable except by Scots”). Fowler was, of course, a well-educated man, but after he got to Guernsey he rarely read anything except the newspaper. “I am the most unliterary person that ever posed as an expert on how to write,” he once complained. And although he had friends and correspondents and collaborators—he was not a hermit—he took pains to distance himself from literary society. He rarely even visited Oxford. Yet his judgment seemed, for several generations of readers, virtually unerring. If it was not the Bible of English usage, Fowler’s “Dictionary” was at least the Hoyle’s: it was the arbiter of all disputes. Yet its authority is based largely on twenty years of reading the papers and plowing through the O.E.D. and other dictionaries. Fowler essentially intuited the state of the language from lexicographical bits and pieces. Out of the slips, he re-created the tongue.

As McMorris points out, many people who never met Fowler have felt that they “know” him, and this is because, however reticent he may have been in person, he was not reticent in print. “Modern English Usage” bristles with personality, not only in the articles on Fowler’s various hobbyhorses, like STURDY INDEFENSIBLES and FACETIOUSFORMATIONS, but in many of the shorter entries as well. The tone is the tone of a schoolmaster, but a rather sly schoolmaster, who won’t let you completely in on the joke. “Welsh rabbit is amusing & right, & Welsh rarebit stupid & wrong”: there is a hint of high facetiousness in this, even though no one who reads it will ever say “Welsh rarebit” again. Like the big dictionary itself, “Modern English Usage” is one of those reference books that are read for pleasure even when the need for instruction has been satisfied. It is a classic of the language. The question is: Is it a dead classic?

Any usage manual is bound to seem antique after seventy-five years. Few people today will experience a need to check the correct pronunciation of “puttee.” Gowers discreetly excised a number of Fowler’s entries in the second edition, in 1965; R. W. Burchfield aggressively rewrote many of them in the third, published in 1996. On the other hand, some of the original entries retain their relevance:

coward(ly). The identification of coward & bully has gone so far in the popular consciousness that persons & acts in which no trace of fear is to be found are often called coward(ly) merely because advantage has been taken of superior strength or position; such action may be unchivalrous, unsportsmanlike, mean, tyrannical, & many other bad things, but not cowardly.

For the first generation of readers, a large part of Fowler’s appeal was his impatience with what he labelled “Superstitions”: never begin a sentence with “But,” never end a sentence with a preposition, never split an infinitive. His general position was that it is almost always worse to appear to have gone out of one’s way not to break a rule than it is to break it when breaking it appears to be unavoidable. Fowler wanted writing to be unaffected and clear, and he wanted writers to do what comes naturally. He believed that the ability to distinguish right from wrong in usage did not require any special philological knowledge but was essentially what he called “a matter of instinct.”

Still, he did think there were rights and wrongs, and it is easy to suspect that “instinct” is a euphemism (not euphuism: see PAIRS & SNARES) for some more invidious term, such as “breeding.” Fowler was a prescriptivist in a profession in which the trend was emphatically in the direction of nonjudgmental descriptivism: the position that whatever people say or write at the moment constitutes “usage,” and there is nothing further to be said about it. Even in his own time, he was regarded by some linguists as a dinosaur. An “instinctive grammatical moralizer,” Otto Jespersen called him.

Fowler was not offended, and although contemporary prejudice is likely to lie with descriptivism—in Jespersen’s time, it seemed the properly scientific attitude; today, it seems the properly democratic attitude—Fowler had a point. A language may be whatever the people who speak that language make it, but “Modern English Usage” is not a book about language. It is a book about idiom, and idiom is language in its moral (also its social, political, and even ethnic) aspect. People make judgments based on usage and pronunciation all the time, just as they make judgments based on clothing and hair style and body odor (not to mention gender and skin color). A speaker whose English is unidiomatic is not saved from ridicule or condescension by the fact that his or her speech is technically correct. There is no more obvious signal that the speaker doesn’t “belong” than speech that is supercorrect—a point Fowler made repeatedly. Language is a social weapon. Fowler was mostly trying to keep it from blowing up in people’s hands.

Still, the people who read Fowler for pleasure are likely to be looking not for information but for the ratification of their own tastes:

To say a French word in the middle of an English sentence exactly as it would be said by a Frenchman in a French sentence is a feat demanding an acrobatic mouth; the muscles have to be suddenly adjusted to a performance of a different nature, & after it as suddenly recalled to the normal state; it is a feat that should not be attempted; the greater its success as a tour de force, the greater its failure as a step in the conversational progress; for your collocutor, aware that he could not have done it himself, has his attention distracted whether he admires or is humiliated. All that is necessary is a polite acknowledgement of indebtedness to the French language indicated by some approach in some part of the word to the foreign sound.

Good advice for the next time you are having tea with the bishop, but it is also a confirmation of the conviction (so British) that more than a “polite acknowledgement” that the French have their own system of pronunciation must be a form of vulgar pretension. (It is characteristic of Fowler to have dropped a French phrase into the entry for readers to practice mouthing.) Fowler is explaining what speakers ought to do when they find themselves about to use a French word, and his advice is perfectly sensible. He is also sneering, just a little, at speakers who try to do more. In “Modern English Usage,” the democratic impulse (let’s stop showing off) and the élitist impulse (showing off is vulgar) are two sides of almost every coin, and this has something to do with the changing status of language during the period of the book’s greatest popularity.

“Modern English Usage” came out in the same year, 1926, that the BBC established an Advisory Committee on Spoken English, for the purpose of providing radio announcers with guidance on pronunciation and diction. It was a panel of learned celebrities: Robert Bridges (the Poet Laureate), Julian Huxley, Kenneth Clark, C. T. Onions (one of the editors of the O.E.D.), and Alistair Cooke all served at various times. The chairman was George Bernard Shaw (whose own pronunciation happened to be Irish but who was, after all, the author of “Pygmalion”). It was the view of the director general of the BBC, Lord Reith, that “the higher a community climbs on the social scale, the greater the degree of uniformity in speech”; but the practical purpose of the committee was simply to eliminate regional dialects and accents among the announcers so that listeners would not develop antipathies based on social prejudice. An announcement delivered in a Liverpool accent might not carry much authority in London. The consequence was the creation of what was in some respects a new dialect: BBC English, the speech of educated professionals. Radio and television are great homogenizers of language. They make the regional seem not colorful and authentic but ignorant and illiterate. They teach everyone the same inflections. “Modern English Usage” belongs to this trend toward a single national standard, which is, despite the destruction of the local and idiosyncratic along the way, the democratic trend.

But language does not homogenize so easily—and this, too, is part of the significance of Fowler’s book. In 1925, an Oxford student named Alan Ross noticed that certain speech habits were becoming markers of social class, and he began collecting examples. He published his results in 1954 as “Linguistic Class-Indicators in Present-Day English,” an analysis famous for establishing the categories U (for upper class) and non-U. Ross’s point was that in a society in which class differences are increasingly difficult to detect—in which breeding, wealth, and power are no longer necessarily overlapping categories—language becomes virtually the only indicator of social class. Ross thought that although the upper class had words and pronunciations peculiar to it, the main characteristic of U speech was the avoidance of non-U speech. And, as is clear from his lists of U and non-U usages, the main characteristic of non-U speech is the effort to sound, in fact, U. “They’ve a lovely home,” for example, is pure non-U, because it is an attempt to be refined. Non-U speakers say “wealthy” and “ever so”; U speakers say “rich” and “very.” Non-U speakers “recall”; U-speakers simply “remember.”

Fowler’s tastes ran in exactly this direction: he thought that writers give themselves away when they use a foreign word, or draw attention to a quaint locution, or prefer an elegant alternative to the common term. “Rarebit” is patently non-U: it is the consequence of a genteel avoidance of the common word “rabbit.” Fowler would never have described his preferences as upper class; he lived frugally and had no social aspirations. But, even as he was trying to make the idiomatic mainstream accessible to everyone, he helped to sustain the feeling that knowing the right word and the correct pronunciation is the sign of a superior nature. There is a lot more satisfaction in getting those things right when you know that other people are getting them wrong. ♦

Louis Menand has contributed to The New Yorker since 1991, and has been a staff writer since 2001.